There are good reasons why people should maintain separate identities and we have thrown it away. Our grandchildren are going to be extremely annoyed with us.

ET Bureau

May 05, 2016, 17:02 IST

Douglas Crockford, an American computer programmer regarded as one of the foremost authorities in the world on the JavaScript programming language, has over the past few decades been an outspoken critic on issues such as online privacy and a vocal proponent of the open source movement. While Google has “provided enormous benefits to society“, Crockford feels that the internet giant has also taken away the rights of users to maintain multiple identities online, including the right to remain anonymous.In a freewheeling chat with ET's Karthik Talwar and Anirban Sen, Crockford who is Senior JavaScript Architect at PayPal spoke about Apple's current encryption dispute with the FBI on unlocking phones, the crisis the internet is currently facing and on the issue of immigration and how it is hurting the ability of the US to attract programming talent. Edited excerpts:

Thirty years on, do you feel that the Internet is going through a midlife crisis?The internet itself is in pretty good shape. The web is the part that I have a problem with. I'm sure a lot of people get confused there. The web was conceived to be a simple document retrieval system, and the way they came up doing that was very, very clever. The problem was that what the world needed was not a document delivery system, so there is this fundamental gap of what the web is good at, and what the world needs.We've been suffering long now, 20 years.So, if you're trying to move things of value like money, it's scary, because the web wasn't designed to do that. But, competitive pressure compels everybody to do that, so everything is at risk. So I'm trying to figure out a way. The east I can do is to look at secure applications. Then we can do all the things we want to do without panicking.

How do you view current debates on how the internet is regulated by governments?That is a big concern. The model that I'm trying to come up with has no points of centrality. There will be the issue of IP address. Right now we have to figure out how everyone in the world can get a unique IP address. That has got to be centralised. I hope that's the only one.

Companies like Google ar e everywhere. They are at the heart of whole debate, especially with their surveillance. How do you view that?There are some things about it that I like a lot. Google has provided enormous benefits to the society, but there are also enormous risks with it. One thing I'm not promising with the system that I'm developing is pseudonymity, where you can have multiple identities, which I don't think is possible anymore because of big data. All of our devices spew so much `metadata' now that it's all swept up and correlated. I think it is impossible for you to have two identities on the same internet.And I think it is terrible. There are good reasons why people should maintain separate identities online and we have thrown it away. Our grandchildren are going to be extremely annoyed with us.Because from our perspective we can't see what the consequences of that are going to be. They are going to have to live with the consequences.

There is a debate going around net neutrality and Free Basics program that Facebook is trying to push. On which side of that debate are you on?I would like to see things remain neutral, remain open. The best thing about the internet and the web is that they are open systems, anybody can play. That doesn't guarantee that you will get any attention or money, but if you want to have a website, you can go and do that. You don't have to go to Facebook or Google or Apple and say, I will give you this percentage of all my profits if you let me be online. Anybody with an idea can go and do that, and I really like that. That is constantly a threat because there are all these companies trying to figure out. The web is so crappy that we can obviously do it better, let's figure out a way to capture the web, replace it with a proprietary system. And so far all the attempts to do that has failed, and hoping that they continue to fail. But, there is no guarantee out there.

In India there was a similar privacy concern raised about the unique identification (UIDAI) system...I think probably it is a lost cause. You're stuck with it and the consequences of it. I mean having such identifiers means that everything you do is trivially correlated with everything else and everyone you know. What it's going to mean, we haven't seen all the implications over here.

How do you view Apple's current encryption dispute with the FBI?The difficulty is that it is a binary question. It's either fully encrypted or not. I like that Apple took the principal stand saying, `No we are not going to do that'. But what I don't like is that they have provided so many unintentional backdoors that makes their stand irrelevant. So even when we think we are doing the right thing, it's clear we are not doing it yet. Governments keep demanding backdoors. That they should be satisfied with all the unintentional backdoors that the software developers have provided them.

Given where software stands right now, what are the shapes that it can take in the future? In the late 40s when we first started, when the...machines started coming online, programming began as a profession. Almost immediately they discovered bugs. When we first designed these, we didn't anticipate that the programs will have to have this level of perfection in order to have any utility, and it is really hard writing stuff which is perfect for human beings. That motivated research in artificial intelligence (AI); we need to figure a way out for machines to write their own programs because humans aren't very good at doing that.

What shape do you see JavaScript taking in the future?One thing I would like to clarify -JavaScript has unexpectedly become an important programming language. That's at least partially my fault. Just want to say sorry (laughs). My position on JavaScript is very different from an author talking about any other programming language because if you look at any other book on programming language, the author is an advocate for that language, and I'm not because JavaScript is a deeply flawed language. It was designed in 10 days, which is an insanely short amount of time to design a programming language. While it has few pieces of brilliance in it, which is extraordinarily brilliant, it has a lot of stuff that is absurdly ridiculous in it.That's a problem because programmers will try to make it their own thing and internalise it and write the stupidest code you ever saw because they feel like they are expressing themselves.

Being in the Valley, how do you view the issue of immigration debate and the debate on programmers coming in from other countries?It is really frustrating. We should be able to get the best talented people in the world to make the best stuff for the world. We should not be putting artificial barriers in front of ourselves. I would make the same recommendations for other countries. We need to get a lot less silly about these restrictions.